I am a firm believer that people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. As kids, the same people from kindergarten surround you until senior year of high school. You have the same teachers; you’re in the same classes, you’re from the same town, play the same sports and share the same hobbies. These people are constantly around you but there comes a time where you separate. Rather it is for college or your families move, there is a distance that comes in between. It’s the friendships that are able to surpass the distance that are the ones the last. As for the other ones…well, they don’t last and that’s OKAY. Childhood friendships are fantastic. You learn life together. You grow up together. You share secrets and make plans.
But then, you grow up. You develop your own interests and make different friends; you simply grow apart.
Here are 10 reasons why you could be outgrowing your friends:
1. You often feel like they aren’t actually happy for you when you announce good news, and you’ve just stopped telling them a lot of it when it happens.
2. The interests you all have are drifting further and further apart, and each time you go out it takes longer to find something that everyone is going to agree on.
3. You are looking at them as being increasingly young, even though you are the same age. You, at times, feel like they are still immature teenagers, when you’re past that point in your life.
4. You are starting to resent always doing the same things on weekends, to the point where you mostly just stay in these days because you don’t want to deal with the same people at the same bar.
5. You are pretty sure they hate you for trying hard to do something different.
6. Their Facebook pictures are all of the same thing and same people.
7. Most of the reason you still consider yourself close with these people is nostalgia. You all used to be right on the same page and now the vast majority of your connection lies in shared memory and experience.
8. Whenever you talk about wanting to move out of your town, and it’s not often, they tend to look at you with this feeling of, “What, you think you’re too good for this?”
9. You don’t like it when people identify you as being “part of that group.”
10. There is a whole different version of yourself that you can imagine, who is surrounded by completely different people than you are surrounded by now.
As unfortunate as it is, friends come and go. There are few people that will make it throughout your entire life, and if you are fortunate enough to find a large group of people that will be there for you, hold on to those people. It is a rare and precious find to have a friendship that can make it through all of the hardships that occur in life.